Thanks for posting this, I have nothing but happy memories of our life in the Southside tenements of Tradeston in the 40's and 50's. However, when our building was condemed, we were thrilled to move to a three story house in Govan.

For the first time we had an actual bathroom with a real bath, goodbye big tin bath kept under the bed. A separate wee kitchenette with two sinks was easier for maw to do the washing...of course there was always the Govan steamie for the big washing.

A gas cooker instead of a coal-fire and one gas ring seemed a luxury.

My Glesga friend Mamie sent me the book called "Our Glasgow" by Piers Dudgeon, some of it very dark. However, I never felt poor, and as a child growing up in Glasgow, the world was an interesting place. I'll always be grateful for the grounding that my life in the tenements gave me.

Have another look at Onyir's slide show and tell me how these appalling conditions could have been improved without condemning the slums.

The lives of many ordinary Glaswegians have improved immeasurably due to the efforts of Labour politicians over the seven decades to which you refer. If you doubt that look at the figures for houses without proper sanitation in Glasgow seventy years ago and compare them to today's figures.

I am very well aware of Glasgow's problems with regard to social deprivation, health and education and I am very interested in hearing how you would solve these problems.

It would seem that distance does indeed lend enchantment as I have a clear memory of the slums of Townhead and elsewhere in Glasgow and in my view it would have taken a deal more than imagination to make these areas fit for habitation.

I lived in the 'slums' of the Old Townhead and would reckon at least 50 percent of them could have been rehabilitated, I know some of them were not fit for human habitation but the council of the day decided like the grey faceless unionists they probably were. 'one down all down'

I showed the video to my youngest daughter and when the only reaction I got from her was silence, finally prised it out of her that " its hard; it looks a hard way of life"

I suppose the issue for me and a lot of other people who were born and brought up in the tenements was the assumption by The Corporation planners and councillors that all who lived up a close wanted to move out to better houses e.g. ones that had inside toilets etc. Obviously, everyone wanted those, but it was the final destination for people that was the issue. Breaking up communities, who'd thrived as a living hub for generations, and decamping them into housing estates with little infrastructure like shops, pubs etc. and expecting people to get on with it was tragic. The joys of having an inside toilet soon wore off when people stood back and took in where they'd been decanted to. It was a long tome ago now, but how many people on the Guide Boards and other social media sites express sorrow about what happened to them and the communities they were born into?

Thanks for posting this, I have nothing but happy memories of our life in the Southside tenements of Tradeston in the 40's and 50's. However, when our building was condemed, we were thrilled to move to a three story house in Govan.

For the first time we had an actual bathroom with a real bath, goodbye big tin bath kept under the bed. A separate wee kitchenette with two sinks was easier for maw to do the washing...of course there was always the Govan steamie for the big washing.

A gas cooker instead of a coal-fire and one gas ring seemed a luxury.

My Glesga friend Mamie sent me the book called "Our Glasgow" by Piers Dudgeon, some of it very dark. However, I never felt poor, and as a child growing up in Glasgow, the world was an interesting place. I'll always be grateful for the grounding that my life in the tenements gave me.

I'll certainly be looking at the Glasgow websites that you mentioned.

Different Guvin frae the wan A' wis dragged up. I never knew there wis even hoosies there.

I suppose the issue for me and a lot of other people who were born and brought up in the tenements was the assumption by The Corporation planners and councillors that all who lived up a close wanted to move out to better houses e.g. ones that had inside toilets etc. Obviously, everyone wanted those, but it was the final destination for people that was the issue. Breaking up communities, who'd thrived as a living hub for generations, and decamping them into housing estates with little infrastructure like shops, pubs etc. and expecting people to get on with it was tragic. The joys of having an inside toilet soon wore off when people stood back and took in where they'd been decanted to. It was a long tome ago now, but how many people on the Guide Boards and other social media sites express sorrow about what happened to them and the communities they were born into?

Well said Sir!! I seen this loads of times myself where the communities were broke up and the people thrown to the far corners of Glasgow leaving them isolated and abandoned. And like you say of course we all wanted better facilities like the indoor bathroom and stuff but that could have been done properly by doing the best of what was there already and adding to it in a sensible way.... not just demolishing everything and then starting again every few decades. Yes many people still feel sorrow for this but the brown envelope has always talked louder in Glasgow than what the voice of ordinary people!!

When still a School girl living in a room & kitchen with ten of a family in a wee street just off the Garscube Road, we moved in April 1953 to a 5 apartment semi detached house in Barlanark and we loved it. We felt like toffs.

Barlanark was just being built at that time so everything was brand new with plenty of fields to play in.

That part of the Garscube Road does not exist anymore and that is a good thing as it was mostly slums.

Arrant nonsense. That is the standard tired excuse espoused by increasingly desperate Labour party apologists who have run our city into the ground over the last seven decades, destroying huge swathes of communities and undermining the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of Glaswegians to such an extent that we have suffered the worst levels of health, education and social deprivation of any city in the UK. These same contemptible Labour party apologists are cognisant of the institutionalised ineptitude and corruption that provided the backdrop to the destruction and devastation of our city. The Tories, of course, had a significant hand in the idealogical, economic and psychological attack on Glasgow, but it is the self-serving Labour party cronies – increasingly controlled from a regressive and dystopian London citadel – that put boots on the ground to do the dirty work.

GG.

While I am inclined towards your view of Labour, having lived in rat infested slums in Glasgow, one brass tap, one light bulb per room, no toilet that would but grace the third world, only hot water boiled on a tiny smelly gas stove; what else but pull them down. The romantic view of Glasgow's slums leaves me wondering did those enamoured by that life ever live there? Or are they consumed by an imagined nostalgia having no memories of anything but that.

I saw nothing to match the slums of Glasgow docklands until I reached Calcutta.

I mean no offence to anyone here, but I worked as a Christmas postman in 1960/61 in the Townhead/Dobbies Loan area, and I have never before or since seen such squalor. My own area of Shettleston was hardly the most salubrious, but seemed like paradise compared to what I saw then, and the memories are still vivid. How anyone can romanticise these areas must be some warped kind of nostalgia.

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Just because we disagree doesn't mean I don't like you, and just because I don't like you doesn't mean I disagree with you.

They took people out of their communities and put them into these housing schemes ok they had more room, hot and cold running water, bathrooms etc but they also brought their mentality with them, the kids then had to travel a long way to school (as there were none in the schemes) at that time back into Glasgow, I for one was the youngest of my family and when all the others left school I had to move to another school which I hated in another part of Glasgow and before long these schemes were no better than where a lot of these people had come from so the powers that be just moved people out of Glasgow into sometimes bigger ghettos with a promise of better living standards. That said there was a lot of old tenements in Glasgow that should have been demolished long before they were but the people your neighbours were unreplaceable. Tally Rand I don't think anyone born and raised in the tenements ever had a romantic views of them fitting 7 people into one room day and night, no one I know anyway.

I mean no offence to anyone here, but I worked as a Christmas postman in 1960/61 in the Townhead/Dobbies Loan area, and I have never before or since seen such squalor. My own area of Shettleston was hardly the most salubrious, but seemed like paradise compared to what I saw then, and the memories are still vivid. How anyone can romanticise these areas must be some warped kind of nostalgia.

Take the people out of the equation Bill, what made the area a slum and with hindesite could nothing have been done to rehabilitate the tenements?The tenement that Zascot and I grew up in Kyle st was only fit for pulling down however across the st the tenement on the corner of Kyle st and Couper st could have and should have been renovated, granted with proper modernization the same number of families would never have been allowed back into the building however the community would have survived, there were umpteen buildings that could have been modernised but the powers that be decided otherwise, and decided a scorched earth policy was best. and I am not looking back through a rose tinted memory.

I was born in Murray Street just opposite Rattrays Bike shop before moving to Couper Street and then Montrose Street from 1963 - 1969. The closemouth in Montrose Street had tiles all the way up. We stayed on the top floor that seemingly had been used as a doctors surgery at the turn of the century... which was great, seeing as there was 7 weans. I agree there were parts of the buildings in the area that would have been classed as a derelict slum however, the point I was making was that with a wee bit of imagination, the outcomes for the community could have been different. You only have to look at other areas in the city where the sandstone building were renovated and not torn down to see what could have been. Remember these buildings had been standing for over a hundred years and had very little improvement / investments done to them. The video shows the state of the back courts and the stair head windows. How many of the concrete prefabs that replaced them stood the test of time? I spoke with a town planner who was working in the renovated communities in the 60s and he told me that he was ashamed of what him and his peers had inflicted on the city. I'm not thinking back through rose tinted glasses. It is people that make a community. Scattered people to the winds, however benevolent it may have appeared at the time, wasn't the answer. Plenty of people, who reflected back to what they missed after being moved out, spoke of the loss of community. All I was saying is it could have been done better if the city fathers had engaged with those more directly affected by their actions rather than listen to city planners who had 'cities of the future' i.e. concrete jungles, floating about in their technical college heads.

A slideshow of a Glasgow childhood in the Toonheid tenements in the 1960s:-

Hi Onyir,Havin' a walk doon memory lane here and 12 seconds in I see a James Hemphill road tanker surrounded by weans. I worked from 1960 as an apprentice plater and boilermaker for a firm called Macleod & Miller where we had the use of one half of a building belonging to the Dechmont coal briquet plant near Halfway (Haufwies) Cambuslang. That's where we made those tanks on the back of that lorry. Hemphill gave us an old lorry on which we put steel plates to cover the rotted wooden boards on the back. I was helping our driver to deliver steel plates to a site in the toon when whizzing through Brigton Cross they all slid off from the left side. Lucky no-one was decapitated that busy day. Another time taking material up to a distillery warehouse (Tomatin) the cops stopped us for the unpteenth time and we had to wait till a wagon with a crane came and, genuinly, tipped our old Hemphill truck onto it's side off the road; load and all, then told us to contact the firm to have it removed.Aye, they didnae muck aboot in the auld days

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"Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.” ― Joseph Heller, God Knows

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